Free to play

[Own u 1107]

27th may there will be 2 weeks f2p trial, but if this end up good, then there might be a hope for F2p in the future.

 

Questions

 

1. Do you think f2p will actually become free in the future?

2. What you think will happen to Af/Df/Vr or P2p?

3. Will Jagex lose money in the long run?

4. Will enough people return to f2p scene, if this become free? OR IS IT TOO LATE

5. What you think about Jagex releasing their own Auto typer?

 

So many questions, so little time

 

Dev Blog: Bots & F2P

 

Over the last few months we have seen a large decrease in hijacking and botting and we have a host of new tools to help even more. Here are just some of the highlights.

• 40,000 bots banned in OS in April
• 17 billion GP removed from RWTers in April
• The recovery in price of many resources
• An official autotyping system
• Work continuing on 2-step authentication

With all this in mind, we are now in a position to start offering a F2P trial version of Old School.

Hijacking

The dedicated support from Mod Weath has helped us see hijacking diminish hugely, so your accounts are much safer than they have ever been. However, we do not want to stop there – work is continuing on a two-step authentication system for Old School and as soon as it is ready, we will roll it out to you.

Bots

Since Old School has started, we have banned over 400,000 bots. In April alone we have removed over 40,000 bots and have taken over 17 billion gp from RWTers. Below you can see two heat maps which show the distribution of bots within Old School. The first map shows the distribution of bots in April while the second shows the distribution only a few days ago, you can quite clearly see the progress that has been made.

April May

The impact of our anti bot activity has impacted on all areas of Old School, the prices of many items have returned to healthy levels, for example the going price for sharks is now back at 1k gp each and the price of chinchompas is steadily increasing. Despite the increased activity against bots, Old School continues to gain more players.

One of the biggest uses of bots in game is the use of autotypers. In itself, autotyping is not a hugely bad thing for Old School, however the impact is something you all have to deal with every day. Not only do they create huge amounts of spam, but also give account hijackers the opportunity to create malicious programs to steal your accounts.

In order to combat the issues created by autotypers we are going to release our own autotyper which is built into the game itself. With a combination of making our chat throttling system dynamic so we can target specific areas and giving you more control over what text you see, this should effectively eliminate in-game spam.

F2P

You will remember that over Hallowe’en last year we ran a free trial for a few days. We carefully monitored the results and although activity increased briefly, we actually lost revenue overall because we didn’t gain any significant number of new members. Obviously this opened our eyes to the fact that as a business we need to ensure F2P is introduced to Old School in the right way. The worst case scenario for us is that we open free to play and enough members decide to cancel their subscriptions to make Old School no longer profitable. If this were to happen, the support we give Old School would diminish which would obviously impact on the updates and support you get. It is in both our interest and your interest to ensure that F2P is delivered properly.

On the 27th May we will start a F2P trial where all newly made accounts will have access to a F2P version of Old School for two weeks. We will be opening a series of new F2P worlds which all members will be able to access. In order to limit any impact from gold farmers and bots we will be disabling yew trees which are the primary targets for these accounts.

Throughout the trial we will be carefully monitoring how it impacts on membership trends so we can see if this is the right way to introduce F2P. If it turns out that this isn’t the right way, we will look at the data and decide what the next step should be.

Throughout this trial we will be doing everything we can to push the trial out to the world, however we need your help too. To make Old School and F2P Old School the best it can be we need all of you to get behind this trial. You need to be telling your friends and ex-clan mates, making videos on Youtube, streaming and generally telling everyone you can that Old School is F2P. You can help by engaging F2P players, giving out welcome packs and anything else you can to help the F2P community feel welcome.

Together we have the opportunity to grow the Old School community hugely by introducing F2P in the right way which is something we all want.

The F2P journey that we are now all embarking upon will end two ways. If we find the right way to introduce F2P we will poll that method to you as a permanent addition to the game. However, you must also be prepared to accept that if we cannot find the right method, we can’t offer F2P as a permanent addition to Old School. Whichever way this goes, we are on the journey together and we will end up making the right decision for the good of Old School and the community.

This afternoon at 5pm BST we have a developer Q&A and on Monday 19th May at 9pm BST we’ll be doing a F2P Q&A both of which will be on our Twitch TV channel and on Tuesday 20th May at 7pm we’ll be doing a F2P AMA on Reddit, feel free to join us then if you have any questions you want to ask, alternatively, feel free to post them on this thread.

Mods Alfred, Ash, John C, Mat K, Reach and Weath
The Old School RuneScape Team

Edited May 16, 2014 by Own u 1107

[D2~]

can't talk

[Eruzione]

hopefully the actually put it in permanently

[Regnierz]

I certainly hope the F2P trial gets more people to play OSRS, but I have a feeling it will be mostly dead, just like EOC/pre-EOC's F2P was dead.

 

Even if more people come in, how many are going to get 120+ and join clans? Not many. Lots of people start up, play a bit, get bored/play other games/realize getting 120+ is too much work for them.

 

Still, being able to play without making that $8 commitment or whatever it is could be big. Should encourage friends and old clan members to give it a shot, no sense wasting an opportunity.

[Guest B0rntowildy]

1. Do you think f2p will actually become free in the future? No

2. What you think will happen to Af/Df/Vr or P2p? What?

3. Will Jagex lose money in the long run? No because this won't be permanent

4. Will enough people return to f2p scene, if this become free? OR IS IT TOO LATE? Too late

5. What you think about Jagex releasing their own Auto typer? Clans who can't manually spam will be ecstatic about it (vr di df af).

Edited May 16, 2014 by B0rntowildy

[Del]

hopefully they profit and make it permanent

[Dillon]

Hopefully this should bring the game back to life a little.

[Double 0 7]

We don't have the answer for all the woodcutting bots, what should we do?

Mod Mark- just remove all the god dame yew trees, problem solved.

Lmao at Jagex logic.

[Adam]

hopefully they profit and make it permanent

[Guest jeffreyp]

1. Do you think f2p will actually become free in the future? no game is dead and other games are more attractive than rs

2. What you think will happen to Af/Df/Vr or P2p? same shit different day

3. Will Jagex lose money in the long run? they still make money just not as much

4. Will enough people return to f2p scene, if this become free? OR IS IT TOO LATE? its too late to apologize

5. What you think about Jagex releasing their own Auto typer?garys hood #1 autotyper bra

[Harry]

So many questions, so little time

[Kerkennah]

Its good they are releasing this

 

I don't see it becoming permanent,unless lots of people who enjoy the trial become members

 

But really, for this to succeed, they need to get many players to play it. They need to do tons of advertising

[Fasty]

This obviously isn't going to succeed

[Bennie]

:cookie: aids

[Rob56]

don't see how someone wanting f2p would come back and invest time into an account knowing they'll have to pay in 2 weeks. seems like it's doomed to fail from the start.